Tag Archives: culture critics

All this service needs is The Omen film soundtrack to complete the outrage: –though I’m not sure even one of Jerry Goldsmith’s unhinged cinematic black masses could quite restore any pretense to grandeur. I’m hesitant to affix my typically gauche, sometimes off-color commentary to content that owes a hat-tip to The Thinking Housewife, the sororal companion-site of […]

Vox Day commenter Porky got into a back-and-forth a few days ago over Modern Music. While we here at la casa del Somesuch obviously won’t back off our K-pop predilections, I thought this slam of his was pretty slamdunk. His back-and-forthing partner’s previous pro-Underworld screed in bold black italics, followed by Porky’s reply in plain […]

I sometimes check out Susan Walsh’s blog Hooking Up Smart, partly because it’s a sort of chillroom annex to Heartiste (not by his design, of course), but mostly because da GBFM (TM) has sometimes stalked its folds. And whatever veldt has seem the tracks of da GBFM is a place worth venturing, whether da GBFM […]

Sigh. How many days was it gone? It felt like a waste eternity. Do you realize, in the first flush of my enthusiasm for it and while it was all out there on youtube to glory over, I went ten whole days without looking at porn? –Not that I “watch porn” anyway; but what I […]

Just because autists spin in circles for hours and decorate the walls with feces, why shouldn’t the media conflate them with someone some medical professional diagnosed as having “pervasive developmental disorder and borderline Asperger’s syndrome, conditions on the autism spectrum” who happens to be a cheerleading theatre-geek Miss America contestant? She’s cute: but did the photographer deliberately […]

Have a big slice of gooey Lincoln Pie. –She puts that line in the comments, but it’s the winner. I used to get worked up about the Oscars, but thankfully, that passion is long since truly spent. In the old days, maybe three or four Best Picture winners really were the best pictures of the year, […]

Mark Steyn on the mental health angle, post Newtown: [I]n a society with ever fewer behavioral norms, who’s to say what’s odd? On 9/11, the agent at the check-in desk reckoned Mohammed Atta and his chums were a bit strange but banished the thought as shameful and discriminatory. In a politically correct world, vigilance is […]

My secular readers may be ill-disposed to take seriously something that comes from a man who teaches and counsels at a Christian reform school, but this essay-length correspondence from View from the Right interlocutor “Vinnie” sounds extremely compelling to me. Understand in advance: this is not a Bible-thumping screed. Every point he makes is grounded […]

What we will see in the next four years is the monarchical government of a president determined to rule without Congress. He will not be able to pass any measures through the House, assuming our representatives will not become his useful idiots. He will therefore continue to rule by executive decree, as he has since […]

That’s my money quote from this– admittedly uneven– takedown on contemporary female celebs at The Hollywood Reporter. Paglia is an enormous influence on me– we have, as Julian Marias says meaningfully of Brentano with regard to Aristotle– a congeniality. But too much of this essay is warmed-over Sex, Art, and American Culture, particularly when Paglia […]

I don’t watch “Modern Family”, or any broadcast tv for that matter, but I guess I understand just enough about it to get the allusion this Real Clear Politics writer, Reed Galen, uses to try and make his very banal and quite idiotic point about how the GOP needs to “change”. First he assures us that […]

I had to search high and low to find this piece I’d read and then “misplaced” on the internet. Damn internet, a terrible place to browse. From the National Journal on the divergences in the polls: The manifestation of these disagreements is evident in polling weights. Most Republican pollsters are using something close to a 2008 […]

Since only violent death seems to keep me from posting at least every other day, I might as well confess I’ve been tied up rewatching For Your Eyes Only and taking in the autumn scenery when I’m not imagining coasting through it in the mayhem of a ski chase. John Donne says somewhere that in […]

A couple of nights ago, I mentally bulleted reasons why Obama’s gonna be in trouble if he emulates Biden’s brusque-hysteric routine in the Vice-Presidential debate. Of course, liberals, ginned up by Biden’s obnoxious performance, and some conservatives unduly cowed by it, will claim that Obama’s gonna be on fire and take back the campaign with […]

The anniversary of Christian Europe’s great naval triumph over the Moslem Ottomans at Lepanto, celebrated today in the Roman Church as the feast of The Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Titian’s great allegory of the battle from the Prado: Of the battle Rebecca West, writing in the “Dalmatia” part of Black Lamb and Grey […]

I think these medical treatments are horrible. Dress and act and feel however you want, but why don’t you value and respect the body you are in? If you don’t, how can you be so absolutely sure that you know why you don’t, such that you can take a permanent surgical treatment to alter it? […]

In a pause from the Parnassian glory of K-pop, we turn to note our favorite teen psychotart from the hablo espagnol quarter, Miss Demi Lovato, who currently sports a bad bottled blonde with ombre streaks of pink: And pink lipstick? And a shoulder-studded denim jacket? And a pleated (p)leather skirt? Oh, Demi, Demi . . […]

From The Guardian: I make even my most ardent pro-choice friends and colleagues very uncomfortable when I explain why my mother should have aborted me. Somehow they confuse the well-considered and rational: “The best choice for both my mother and me would have been abortion” with the infamous expression of depression and angst: “I wish […]

. . . .and other disgusting tales of the Olympians (pre-London): For a few and the most committed, the games continue — all the way home. On a United Airlines flight from Sydney to Los Angeles in 2000, nearly 100 Olympians were among the passengers, causing the flight attendants to begin the flight with a […]

I have no objection to a twenty-plus volume complete OED presented online-only. But to deduce from this development that all printed volumes must– or should– die away is bunk. I have, through no fault of my own, a couple of dictionaries available on my laptop, and I have nothing to do with them. I have […]

I’ve been pondering some rambling thoughts about the Batman shootings and cinematic violence, but I’ll put that off for now. Reading backwards through some comments at althouse, I did enjoy a moment of levity from this (humorous, but not without a point) comment from chickelit: Why can’t these Batman-obsessed nutjobs worship Catwoman instead and go […]

Warren Beatty. Annette Bening. Bugsy. The charisma, the danger, the erotic charge. Two latter-day Hollywood titans with old school glamour and talent to burn. What possibly could go wrong? From the Daily Mail: It’s no secret in Hollywood that Warren Beatty and Annette Bening had a hard time accepting the transitioning of their eldest daughter […]

This pseudonymous commenter at isteve claims a bit of social contact with the famed authoress of The Morning After, and your own gossipmonger here thinks (purely for armchair reasons) it passes the smell test: slumber_j said… As most people who have ever had any dealings with her will attest, Katie Roiphe is a supremely self-infatuated walking […]

I know these words were put in Soyeon’s mouth. But O, the humanity, that 7-ara should speak against itself! On July 14th, T-ara held an inauguration ceremony with their fan club, “QUEEN’s“, at the Kyunghee University’s Peace Hall located near Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul. Dani, who has been confirmed as T-ara’s ninth member, made a surprise appearance […]

That’s how the police are calling it, according to the Daily Mail: A husband arrived home to find his wife murdered, stabbed in the back in what police are investigating as a home invasion robbery gone wrong. The body of Simeonette Mapes-Crupi, 29, a New York City social studies teacher, was found on Thursday afternoon […]

The Apocalypse is nigh: T-ara will be destroyed welcoming two new members to their group. One will be revealed on the 31st, while the other will be revealed this coming June. Core Contents Media confirmed on the 23rd, “The newly added 8th member of T-ara is 18 years old and possesses a great visual and talent. […]

The public’s already been treated to the album covers for T-ara’s forthcoming Japanese-language compilation Jewelry box, but now we have the unlooked-for treat of a preview of the discs with randomly-assigned images of the bandmembers (minus Jiyeon, who isn’t covered, poor thing, in this kpopstarz gallery). Long live the CD. Damn mp3s to hell, with […]

Our own honest Ovid, GBFM,’s noted peer heartiste, links to this female journalizer’s cri de coeur after some unsatisfying experiences with professional matchmaking: I do understand where his clients are coming from. They may want twenty-somethings for superficial reasons, or perhaps these men already have spawn from previous relationships and are in no mood to reproduce in the […]

Probably– probably– even the people who come up with this stuff know they’re full of crap. Well, one could hope . . . . Teachers are banning schoolkids from having best pals — so they don’t get upset by fall-outs. Instead, the primary pupils are being encouraged to play in large groups. Educational psychologist Gaynor Sbuttoni said […]

One of Lawrence Auster’s alert readers directs his attention to this commentary from Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker: It would be hard to imagine a more unlikely historical moment than this one for birth control to become a matter of outraged political controversy. For starters, there is the statistic that ninety-nine per cent of […]

Hello? Have you ever listened to the lyrics on “Born to Run”?! Yes, movement is involved in running, but it was scarcely an optimistic attitude. Springsteen had us running from the “death trap,” the “suicide rap” that was the “runaway American Dream.” That home town of yours supposedly “rips the bones from your back.” Yeah, […]

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit: The political reaction to “slut” was opportunistic, of course, but it worked with a lot of women because — apparently, even in this age of sexual liberation and “slut pride” — women are still somehow deeply affected by charges of wanton and undiscriminating sexual behavior. This might even account for the […]

An incident as reported at “ksat.com” (no, this is not about K-pop), entitled “Racial incident mars high school game”: SAN ANTONIO – A local school district is apologizing after an apparent incident of racism at a boys high school basketball game this past weekend. When the final whistle blew Saturday, Alamo Heights celebrated a convincing […]

A vigorous pile-on in the comments thread for this (rather free-ranging) entry from Althouse. I’ll quote Synova: If we don’t complain about this, not about the “free” part and what that means to the economy, or the infringement on the rights of Catholic institutions… What else can we ever complain about ever again? It’s going to […]

Conservative journalist and provocateur Andrew Breitbart has died. His jolly knack for honing in on the most egregious excesses of sanctified liberalism and then exposing them to the merriment of the commonsense world will be missed.

Ann Althouse formulates a new law of journalism. Or at least, female linguistics: Whenever researchers find something to be true of females, they will interpret and report it as evidence of female superiority. As I’ve pointed out many times, this rush to patronize women reveals an underlying fear that women actually are inferior. Althouse actually […]

In the insignificant Western peninsula known as Italy, ladyfolks are in a roar over this local’s entrepreneureal tactics. The Daily Mail says: After eight years running a bar, Laura Maggi suddenly found men beating a path to her door. Not for the quality of her coffee and aperitifs, but because she had started appearing for […]